Voting For January FOTM

[Damkid]

Sorry for my absence guys, i know its already Jan. 11th but to catch up on FOTM, the voting will run for 1 week and end on Jan. 18th

So to keep this all fair, i will acknowledge the entries posted before December 23rd, any entry posted after that i will move into the February entry thread

So for January there were 2 Entries and they are from TheresGabe and Doug Brown

Here's Gabe's entry

I'll throw my hat in for this months!

1990 Ford Festiva L.

My brother-in-law purchased the car 7 years ago with a bad clutch for $50 from a friend of mine. (I had owned 3 festivas at the time) He replaced the clutch, and drove it 15k miles. At that point about 4 years ago, the rear main seal went out. We went to Pick'n'pull and pulled an engine out of a '97 Aspire with 56k miles on it, that had been destroyed in the back. He had the engine completely redone by a local engine shop. New pistons, rods, camshaft, everything re-done. He put about 25,000 miles on it, and then parked it. He decided at age 48, he wasn't going to drive a Festiva anymore.

Well I got the car from him back in June for $300.

Things I have done since June:

-Rear bearings
-Rear drum assembly
-Rear Brakes
-Front Brake pads
-Passenger side lower control arm (ball jumped the cap, sending my tire wheel into the fender)
-New Passenger side front fender (See above)
-Drivers side lower control arm (I was scared after the one one went)
-Passenger side CV axle
-Racing Stripe (+10hp)
-13" AE-86 Corolla rims with 155 65R 13 tires
-Chrome Trims rings (+5hp)
-Interior Color change
-Smoked Corner lights
-Smoked Tail lights
-Sony head unit
-Pioneer 4" speaks in all stock locations
-Sony 250w Amplifier
-Currently JL Audio 8" Sub in ported box (My 12's in the bandpass were just too big)
-Cargo cover

Lots of Love to a car that had 239,000 miles on it, before it ever received any love. MOST IMPORTANT: This car has made me fall back in love with Festivas, and with cars in general. Makes me wonder why I ever left Festivas in the first place.

[Damkid]

And Doug Brown's entry

OK, I'll give it a try - although mine is definitely still a work in progress!

It is a 1990 Festiva L 5-spd.

I bought it from a guy in my town for $850. He said he had put in a new clutch and that the car was towed behind a motor home for most of it's 163,xxx mile life. It had a couple of pretty new tires, a multi-shades of blue spray can paint job, a cracked windshield, non-functional AC, radiator fan that was always on, towing brackets and wiring to be towed, and a large part of the gray interior and been repainted gray with a paint brush.

Not your basic concours car!!! But I bought it so I could carry stuff for our sailboat back and forth from home, my workshop and the marina at an inexpensive price. We also have a Jeep Cherokee and it would get 21-mpg doing the marina run, so the Festiva's mpg appealled to me.

In the first 10-days that I drove it I found that at 54-mph the tires hopped all over the place and shocks were marshmellows. The brakes were spongey and the radio didn't work. My wife hated the car.....

I bought a set of KYB 2G struts off E-Bay and was getting ready to put them on when the oil pump failed and toasted the engine. Who ever heard of an oil pump failing on a Festiva?????

So it sat in front of the house for 7-months while I decided what to do. Finally I started looking for an engine and found one on Craig's list up in the Norfolk area (185 miles away) that had been rebuilt about a year ago for $150. Off we went and the motor came home in the back of the Cherokee.

I ended up stripping the engine down and finding that what he said he had replaced he actually had! I did replace the cylinder head with a fully rebuilt one and added a new clutch disc and pressure plate - and really cleaned the engine interior and painted the exterior of it. Swapped out the engines, fired it up and the new engine ran on 3 cylinders.....

Major depression followed and the car sat for another two months while I - again - decided what to do. Eventually I put up an ad for $250 and some guy said he would come and get it - and never did. So - what the hell - might as well go all in...

Check all the plugs and wiring - OK. Bought a brand new shiney compression tester and found that my cylinder pressures were 183/185/185/185. Fiddled around somemore and found that it was cylinder #2 that was dead. Shortening up the story it turns out that one of the brand new fuel injectors was defective and it got replaced.

Now the engine ran on all 4 but the front axles and bearings made tons of noise. So all new axles, bearings, seals and brake discs. The car ran and got 38.6-mpg. Not the 40+ I had hoped for, but not bad. I didn't want to deal with the 12" tires so found a set of 13" Geo steel rims and bought 155x65x13 tires for it. With the new tires, the mileage went up to 40.9-mpg and I could now safely break the 54 mile and hour barrier!

So since I was going to use the Festiva more as a truck than a car, I went into a "lightening" mode. I removed the entire AC system, the radio, all the speakers, the entire rear seat, the rear seat belts and the steel towing brackets. Pounds lighter, the car seemed to be much happier.

I found a brand new pair of Hella 500 fog lights in the shop that I had bought for the Cherokee years ago, painted the front grill and put them on the car. And at the moment, that is where I am at with the car. Eventually it will become Dark Hunter Green one spray can at a time.....

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